Photo: Tijana Drndarski / Unsplash
You bought the good jumper in October. It cost real money, it was going to last, and by February the cuffs have gone soft, the wool has that slightly matted look and it’s quietly moved to the back of the drawer. The fabric was fine. It went through the washing machine roughly twelve times, and that’s what did it.
What a wash actually does to wool
Water swells the fibres and the drum rubs them against each other for forty minutes. Then the spin twists the shape out of the shoulders. Detergent lifts the dirt, and it lifts a little of the fibre with it, which is the fluff in your filter and the pilling under your arms.
Knitwear shows it fastest, but a blazer, dark jeans and a silk blouse lose colour and shape in the same slow way, which is why we end up blaming the shop.
The sniff test and the hang test
Take the jumper off and hold the underarm to your nose. Nothing there? Back on the shelf, and you’ve saved a wash. If it smells of the pub, hang it by an open window overnight and check again in the morning; wool and cashmere let go of smells on their own once they get some air.
The hang test is for anything that’s creased rather than dirty. A blazer that’s spent a day on your shoulders needs a night on a wooden hanger, buttons undone, and most of the creases will have dropped out by the time you’re reaching for your coffee.
Steam, air and a brush
Between washes, three tools do almost all the work. A clothes brush, dragged down a coat in long strokes, takes off the dust and the cat and lifts the flattened pile. Air, as above, sorts out smell. Steam sorts out the rest, and it’s the one most of us don’t own yet.
A blast of steam relaxes the fibres so the creases drop out and the shape comes back, and it freshens a garment without a single thread going near the drum. Handheld steamers have moved from shop back rooms into ordinary homes, and the Laurastar website now lists them right beside the ironing boards, which tells you how normal the habit has become. One lives in the wardrobe and takes two minutes over a shirt hanging on the door.
When something’s properly dirty, wash it. The steamer stands in for the wash you were about to do out of habit.
What you get back
A jumper that still looks like itself in March. Jeans that stay dark past the first summer. A blouse whose seams haven’t gone wavy, and an evening a fortnight that used to go on hanging things on an airer.
WRAP, the UK waste charity behind Love Your Clothes, worked out that keeping a garment in use for just nine months longer cuts its carbon, water and waste footprint by up to a fifth. Most of those extra months are won at home, because it’s rarely the wearing that finishes off a jumper; it’s the washing. If you’ve read the buying less posts here, you’ll know where this is going: the greenest jumper you’ll ever own is the one already in the drawer, so long as it sees the machine a bit less often.
